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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Talking with clouds
Of all living Arab poets, Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi is probably the one dearest to Egyptians, whatever their walk of life, whether they be poor or rich, educated or illiterate. He is unique in his popularity. He can delight the most sophisticated of poetry lovers, just as he can entertain and move those who are usually preoccupied with more mundane matters than metre and rhyme. Nor is this love affair with the people a mere flash in the pan. His national preeminence dates back to the sixties, when a number of popular singers of the period, notably Abdel-Halim Hafez, first made his lyrics famous.
El-Abnoudi transformed Egyptian song, opening up a channel through which the ballads of Egyptian peasants, and in particular the traditions of Upper Egypt, could flow into the mainstream. He brought these texts from his country to the heart of the metropolis, and they took fashionable Cairo by storm. Intellectuals who migrated from the countryside often adopt the idiom of the city and its educated classes; El-Abnoudi, however, still speaks a dialect that is true to his Upper Egyptian origins. In his work, he showed how the Saidi vernacular was quite capable of expressing the most subtle shades of feeling and the most sophisticated of literary themes.
All Egyptians old enough to remember the days of the construction of the Aswan High Dam will remember El-Abnoudi's popular radio programme, in which he recited a long serialised poem in the form of letters between an Upper Egyptian working on the dam and his wife back in the village. For the first time, the daily concerns and worries of the villagers, their hopes and aspirations, were made eloquently present to the whole nation.
Yet it is not only his Saidi poems that make El-Abnoudi a major figure. Though the southern dialect remains his trademark, he has also written a great many poems in standard Egyptian colloquial, as well as in other North African dialects. He owes his linguistic versatility to the many years he spent touring the region, tracing and collecting the various sources of Al-Sira Al-Hilaliya (The Epic of Beni Hilal), which he eventually gathered together and published in a monumental eight-volume edition.
This most recent collection consists of poems written between 1981 and 1998, all on the theme of loss and grief. The poet's subject now is ageing and the recognition that many of the dreams he has spent his life chasing after will never be attained. In an eloquent poem entitled Writing, El-Abnoudi says:
It was my wish to make writing
That would bring bitter cold into the height of summer,
Stroke the feathers of a nightingale,
Make the wretched exuberant,
Converse with the seas
And make one cloud talk to me.
(But advancing age
Taught me to be neither sad
Nor happy, and never to regret).
[...]
I looked at my hand in the sun,
I liked the scent of my song,
I believed in the two steps I made
Towards whatever I could see.
Maybe what I saw was too far to grasp,
Maybe I touched its outline
Or maybe it touched me,
Swimming towards me.
Was it a man's promise or that of a wolf?
The promise -- a paradise or a jungle?
And in which should I put the trust of my writing?
